7of7Steyer stickers at a September town hall meeting for the presidential candidate in Oakland.Photo: Kate Munsch / Special to The Chronicle

New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker noted that at this week’s Democratic presidential debate, “there will be more billionaires than black people.”

Julián Castro, Booker’s fellow presidential candidate and a former housing and urban development secretary, bemoaned that “billionaire Tom Steyer just personally bought his way onto the next debate stage.” The nearly all-white debate lineup “is deflating” for the nearly half of Democrats who aren’t white, Castro added.

Steyer and the other white, extremely rich candidate in the Democratic field, Mike Bloomberg, are spending a lot of time defending their right even to run for president in a party whose base increasingly is suspicious of wealth. Both sought to convince voters on campaign swings through Northern California last week that their wallets and whiteness are not disqualifying.

Steyer even took some billionaire-on-billionaire swings. He called on Bloomberg to support a wealth tax along the lines of what he, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren have proposed. Steyer backs a 1% tax on wealth exceeding $32 million, similar to what Sanders is advocating. Warren is proposing a 2% wealth tax on people with more than $50 million and a 3% tax on those with more than $1 billion.

“If you’re not willing to,” Steyer told The Chronicle’s “It’s All Political” podcast, “you may well be appropriate to run for president, but not as a Democrat.”

Bloomberg did not directly answer a wealth tax question during a campaign stop in Stockton, but instead did something few politicians would do: He reminded people that when he held office, he increased taxes. It was during his 12 years as New York mayor, and the purpose was to pay for raises for teachers and improved city services.

“I’m not opposed to taxing people at all,” Bloomberg said, adding that he opposed the GOP-written 2017 tax law “because I thought the wealthy, just like me, did not need a tax cut. We’re doing fine, thank you very much. We needed that money for infrastructure.”

The two are similar in ways beyond their riches, which are considerable — Bloomberg, 77, head of a media empire, is worth $55 billion, while former San Francisco hedge fund manager Steyer, 62, is worth $1.6 billion.

Both are charter members of the Giving Pledge, which consists of billionaires who promise to give away half their wealth in their lifetimes. Both are climate-change hawks who have donated millions to environmental causes and set up organizations to cut carbon emissions.

And both have given millions to Democratic organizations and candidates. Bloomberg spent $110 million on the 2018 midterm races alone, while Steyer spent $74 million.

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Both have apologized for past actions that would put them far out of the modern Democratic mainstream. Steyer says he regrets that the hedge funds that he once ran profited from investments in fossil fuels and private prisons. Days before Bloomberg said he would seek the Democratic nomination last month, he apologized at a Brooklyn church for his support of the policy of stop-and-frisk, under which New York police stopped people they thought might be involved in criminal activity and searched them for weapons and other contraband. Officers detained far more African Americans and Latinos than members of other racial and ethnic groups.

And both exude the confidence of a corporate executive when they explain why they got into the presidential race late: Both believed they were the only ones who could beat President Trump.

“I listened to the first couple of debates, and I didn’t feel like anyone was leveling with the American people” about the amount of fundamental change needed to improve the system, Steyer told The Chronicle.

“I saw the trend that we were on, and I said, ‘This just can’t be,’” Bloomberg said in Stockton. “And I would never forgive myself if I didn’t at least try to do something about it.”

Even though both billionaires are polling in the low single digits along with Booker and Castro, both are influencing the race through their wallets. Steyer spent $47 million through September, nearly three times as much as former Vice President Joe Biden, the current front-runner. Bloomberg intends to spent $100 million through the end of the year, including $14 million on TV advertising in California alone.

Yet they also share an unwanted distinction: Along with Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, they were the only candidates who had higher negative than positive ratings among likely California Democratic voters surveyed last month for a Berkeley IGS Poll.

Could it be because the two are billionaires?

Before Bloomberg could answer a question in Stockton about whether he was trying to buy the election, the city’s 29-year-old African American mayor, Michael Tubbs, answered it for him.

There will be time to talk about reforming the campaign finance system after a Democrat wins the White House, Tubbs said. But given that Trump raised $165 million through September, “it’s going to take resources” for a Democrat to beat him, Tubbs said. “So whoever the nominee is, they’re going to have some money behind them.

“Mayor Bloomberg has the resources, the record and the relationships to fight an existential threat to our country, which is Donald Trump,” Tubbs said.

Steyer also has the resources, but he doesn’t have the record. Unlike Bloomberg, Steyer has never even run for public office. Instead, he casts himself as a political outsider who has been able to get results by funding ballot measures in California.

In 2016, he took on tobacco corporations and spent $14 million to pass Proposition 56, which raised taxes by $2 per pack of cigarettes, with the revenue going to health programs. In 2012, he spent nearly $30 million on Proposition 39, which closed a loophole that enabled out-of-state corporations to avoid paying some taxes in California. In 2010, he spent $5 million to oppose the oil-company-backed Proposition 23, which would have suspended California’s landmark climate change law mandating reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

For two years, Steyer has funded and been the front man for Need to Impeach, which gathered 8.3 million online petition signatures to remove Trump from office, long before House Speaker Nancy Pelosi thought it was a good idea. Steyer points to it as an example of how he has led change from the outside.

“Who do you trust to actually turn (the system) around?” Steyer said. “Do you trust someone who’s successfully done it from the outside for 10 years and has a history, or do you think that it’s going to be someone from inside the system?”

Andrea Gourdine’s impression of Steyer changed after she heard him speak last week at Rossmoor, the 10,000-resident retirement community in Walnut Creek.

“All I knew about him was that he was Johnny One Note on impeachment,” said Gourdine, a retired human relations director for San Francisco. She was swayed by his support for a wealth tax. “Not that I think billionaires don’t want to pay for their fair share. But it’s a new way of paying taxes, and I’m impressed that he was willing to do it.”

But Steyer’s outsider experience isn’t the same as serving in government, said Bobby Bivens, president of the Stockton NAACP.

“The only problem I have with him is that we’ve not seen him in a public office, so you don’t really have an idea of how he would function as a policy person, or as a person that has to deal with diverse group,” Bivens said.

But Bivens, who is an undecided voter, was also unimpressed with Bloomberg’s apology for stop-and-frisk, which came five years after he left office.

“That’s BS,” Bivens said after hearing Bloomberg speak in Stockton. “You can’t be the mayor and don’t know what the policies of your police department are.”

Joe Garofoli is the San Francisco Chronicle’s senior political writer, covering national and state politics. He has worked at The Chronicle since 2000 and in Bay Area journalism since 1992, when he left the Milwaukee Journal. He is the host of “It’s All Political,” The Chronicle’s political podcast. Catch it here: bit.ly/2LSAUjA

He has won numerous awards and covered everything from fashion to the Jeffrey Dahmer serial killings to two Olympic Games to his own vasectomy — which he discussed on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” after being told he couldn’t say the word “balls” on the air. He regularly appears on Bay Area radio and TV talking politics and is available to entertain at bar mitzvahs and First Communions. He is a graduate of Northwestern University and a proud native of Pittsburgh. Go Steelers!